MGG Pillai Commentary View

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Freedom of the Press or the freedom to press?

THIS YEAR'S WORLD PRESS Freedom Day, marked every year on 03 May, in Kuala Lumpur began with a lie. In the official booklet given to those who attended, is the "World Press Freedom" rankings, which Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters without borders) prepare annually. A metaphorical ruler is used to rank press freedom in 167 countries, in which Denmark is annointed as the most free and North Korea the least. But only 166 countries are ranked. Several in the hall looked long and hard for Malaysia's ranking. It is not there. Look at the data carefully and you would find Jordan ranked 121 and Liberia 123. It is fair to assume Malaysia ranks 122, a dozen places down from the 2004 rankings. This censorship undermined whatever the day was to mean.

But it reflected the yawning divide between the theory of press freedom and the practice of it. The governments, journalism schools, NGOs and many practitioners opt for the theory to put the practitioners in a strait jacket. Since since they have the upper hand, they have their way. A free press is the last institution anyone in authority and power wants. This is universal. That great bastion of the free press, the United States, denies it in Iraq and elsewhere when it can, with official sanction. It does not matter if the nation is a democracy, dictatorship, theocracy or run by the armed forces: press freedom is defended so long as the media will sing their tune. Shackles are put on the press, ever more so in recent years than in the centuries past. The press, radio and television, by and large, is an appendage of governments or commercial organisations. In Malaysia, every major newspaper, radio, television is controlled either by the government or by the private sector.

The press is important, in this view, only if it makes a profit that would attracts investors. It is no different than an abbatoir, a restaurant, or a manufacturing plant in the bowels of a conglomerate. The fourth estate is reduced to a commodity, which can be bought and sold, thus losing its raison d'etre. Even editors now are business men, often with little or no experience in the trade and there only as the agent of the government or the conglomerate that owns it. The Free Press we talk of is now a myth and a mirage. It is now an instrument to manipulate public opinion, and woe betide any who works in it who challenge this. Great effort and time is spent to fine-tune this new slavery of the Press (by which I mean all media). The guts of the Free Press is removed, and a halo built around it to mask what has happened. I would add that the more official concern there is to a Free Press, the more it is there is none.

The Finnish Embassy sponsored this year's event. The Asian Institue of Development Communication (Aidcom) organised it, with help from the Malaysian Press Institue, the National Press Club and the United Nations. The theme for this year is "Media and Good Governance". The editor of The Hindu, Mr N. Ravi, gave the main address on the nature and purpose of a free press. It was a masterly account of what he would like the Press to be, but with little emphasis on how it can affect the practitioners. He admits he has to walk a tight line to keep still, and his work now is less editorial and more as a representative of his newspaper in the outside world. But The Hindu is more successful than most newspapers because the family that runs it, of which he is one, has seen to it that it would concentrate on the business of news, in all its myriad applications. Becaue of that, and of the steadfast principles the newspapers are run by, it is one of the best newspapers in the world. It goes by its own rules, tested and reworked in its century of existence that gives it its unusual pedigree amongst India's and the world's newspapers.

If one expected this annual event would address local concerns of a global problem of the Press – I had given up any hope of that years ago – one would come away disappointed. Meetings like these are predicated on the belief that the best examples for the local newspapers are found elsewhere in the world. Local examples – like the deputy information minister lead a demonstration against the Internet newspaper, malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com) – are never mentioned, even if that and other examples of putting press freedom on notice led to Malaysia's decline in the RSF rankings this year. it is more a mea culpa for what went wrong in their watch. These meetings are held to seek elegant reasons to mask the gross erosion of Press Freedom as governments and commercial corporations grapple with each other how to neuter it into a propaganda machine.

This year, in Kuala Lumpur, the organisers brought in six undergraduates on what they thought of press freedom. All opted for the status quo, with minor disputes on if the restrictions should be more or less. One got the feeling at the end of it that none understood what Press Freedom was all about, but could expound on it. This is not surprising. Even undergraduates are warned not to think, and follow the safest course of action. When the young should be demanding change, they now demand punishment for those who want to. It was good debating fun, at the end of which even the speakers did not seem to understand the issues at stake.

But it was a good move to bring them in. The speakers were intelligent, and said home truths few in the audience would have dared say in public. One undergraduate spoke of Malaysia as a hopelessly polarised society, a truth many in the hall missed. But it did point to one fact: that the young have the idealism, the pragmatism and the impudence to say what others, older and perhaps wiser, shy from. But I also fear these young men and women are driven down a path which can only lead to disappointment. They represent the youth, the grandchildren of the independence generation, who would herald the change that has eluded us for so long. This is long overdue.

All that this year's World Press Freedom Day meant, for me at least, is the continuing divide between practice and theory of the Free Press, with the practitioners pushed deeper into the corner where they can only be wrong, the coming irrelevance of the Free Press as it become appendages of corporate empires, the worsening shortcomings of journalism schools, and the rise of NGOs with a theoretical agenda that has no relevance in practice but is nevertheless welcomed by non-practitioners as an ally. In the defence of the Free Press, the practitioner is a dodo. Paradoxically, what the Free Press (in all its manifestations) stand for is as irrelevant as the message it carries. The media practitioner has become an orphan in his own trade. If this trend continues, we would have admirable laws and conventions to protect the Free Press, but without the flesh and blood that makes it one. It would be as relevant as Press Councils in many a Third World country. Is that what press freedom is all about"

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com